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The Genetic Fallacy

Logic and race in 21st-century America.

By

James Taranto

January 23, 2012

As South Carolina was handing Newt Gingrich his first victory Saturday, New York Times columnist Charles Blow was, not surprisingly, denouncing the former speaker for "appealing to . . . an ugly, gut-level anger and animosity among a sizable portion of the Republican electorate."

This animosity, Blow suggests, is racial in nature, although it takes a curious form: "the belief among many Republican voters that race is inconsequential to one's ability to succeed in this country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, Republican voters, particularly those in the South, were more likely than all voters to say that blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead in today's society." What Blow is describing isn't prejudice against blacks but a favorable opinion of America--unrealistically favorable, in Blow's view.

Blow followed up on his column with a Saturday tweet: "Don't need Newt 2 tell me abt blk ppl, work and food stamps. Ancestors worked 4 free, nearly starved 2 death & were branded w cattle stamps!" (The shortened words and numerals are to fit the message into Twitter's 140-character limit.)

We tweeted back: "A RT [retweet] to the first reply that correctly identifies the logical fallacy @CharlesMBlow commits in the tweet I just RT'd." This provoked a flurry of responses, including one directing us to a subsequent Blow Tweet: "I have a full-blown stalker at the WSJ... #block." He did indeed block our Twitter account, which means, among other things, that our tweets mentioning him are invisible to him. We await Julian Sanchez's disquisition about the liberal left's "epistemic closure."

The answer we were looking for, and congrats to Christopher Lewallen for coming up with it, is the genetic fallacy. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: "A critic commits the genetic fallacy if the critic attempts to discredit or support a claim or an argument because of its origin (genesis) when such an appeal to origins is irrelevant." Blow's appeal to his own authority based on the injustices his ancestors endured is an especially literal case of the genetic fallacy; his claim is that his DNA supports his argument. But the genetic fallacy can also involve the origins of an idea or an institution.

Here's another example: You often hear conservatives point out that defenders of segregation during the Jim Crow era were almost all Democrats, and specifically that more Democratic lawmakers than Republicans (in proportion as well as number) voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The conclusion, whether explicit or implicit, is that the GOP deserves to be considered the party of civil rights. Although the factual basis for the argument is true, the reasoning is fallacious. The parties have changed so much in their regional and ideological compositions since 1964 that the 48-year-old comparison is irrelevant, or very nearly so, in evaluating them today.

The genetic fallacy is useful in understanding this columnist's own theory of race in contemporary America. Our view is that the prevailing left-liberal understanding of race is based in a genetic fallacy--that liberals view black-white relations in terms of the social and political order that prevailed in the middle of the 20th century, ignoring or denying how thoroughly that order was upended by the civil rights revolution, which culminated in the 1964 act. (They do not, of course, make the error in Republicans' favor that we noted in the preceding paragraph, though they sometimes gloss over the Democratic Party's segregationist past.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic responds to our Tuesday column--in which we described the previous night's standing ovation for Gingrich as, "next to the election of a black president, . . . the most compelling dramatization of racial progress so far this century"--with a powerfully written and indignant post:

Again if you really want to believe that racism "lives on in the minds of liberals" and that Gingrich's address to Williams stands just below the election of the country's first black president, I'm sure you can marshal some sort of evidence for support. If your chief goal, as a thinking person, is to find a path to making yourself right, you may never amount to much of a thinking person, but you can never be disappointed. . . .

People who are regularly complicit in wrong, are not in the habit of admitting such things. The unwillingness to admit wrong, the greedy claim upon the powers of disappointment, the deep sense of injury is not coincidental--it is a necessary fact of wrong-doing. The charge that the NAACP are the actual racist is the descendant of the notion that abolitionists wanted to reduce Southern whites to "slavery," that the goal of civil rights was the rape of white women. That Barack Obama would have a "deep-seated hatred of white people" is not a new concept.

We should note, as Coates does not, that this column has never taken the position "that the NAACP [is] the actual racist" or that the president has a "deep-seated hatred of white people" (the latter is a 2009 quote from Glenn Beck). Both statements seem quite wrong to us, although we have argued that the NAACP of today (or, to be precise, of 2010) falls short of its professed devotion to the ideal of racial equality.

But it seems to us equally wrong to describe either of these foolish statements as a "descendant" of the arguments once offered in defense of slavery and Jim Crow. Instead, they are ill-considered reactions to a new kind of inequality that developed in the wake of the civil rights revolution, defined by Shelby Steele in his brilliant 2006 book, "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era":

This is when I first really saw white guilt in action. Now I know it to be something very specific: the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one's race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a world of vulnerability. The authority they lost transfers to the "victims" of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power.

It is prudent to acknowledge that the "black power" Steele describes is much more circumscribed than the "white power"--white supremacy--that prevailed in the antebellum or Jim Crow South (and to a lesser extent in other parts of the country). In a culture of white guilt, blacks do not have the power to oppress whites, only to command deference when the subject turns to race or related matters.

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Nonetheless, to those whites for whom white guilt is not rooted in experience--those, including this columnist, who are too young to remember a time when full citizenship for blacks was a cruel fiction--the culture of white guilt can seem unfair and irrational, and can be a source of irritation and anger. Why is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respected while a National Association for the Advancement of White People would be considered racist? Why did Obama get away with calling his grandmother "a typical white person," when a white politician who made the same statement about a black person would be pilloried?

There are reasonable answers to questions like these--answers that are obvious to those who are old enough to remember Jim Crow or who have a sufficiently deep understanding of American history. What is not a reasonable answer is a hectoring assertion of one's own moral authority, either as a black person or as an enlightened white.

White guilt was probably a necessary and unintended consequence of the civil rights revolution. It's an example of Saul Alinsky's "key of converses":

Seeing everything in its duality, we begin to get some dim clues to direction and what it's all about. It is in these contradictions and their incessant interacting tensions that creativity begins. As we begin to accept the concept of contradictions we see every problem or issue in its whole, interrelated sense. We then recognize that for every positive there is a negative, and that there is nothing positive without its concomitant negative, nor any political paradise without its negative side.

What Alinsky describes is a complex interplay, not a zero-sum game. He believed in progress, and so do we. Compared with white supremacy, white guilt represents an enormous moral step forward. For this reason, we do not share the pessimism Steele expresses in his subtitle.

One cannot go backward. White supremacy is as good as dead, and white guilt is dying along with guilty whites of older generations. Both these developments constitute progress toward racial equality. The election of a black president was the most compelling dramatization this country has seen of the death of white supremacy. In our view, it is also hastening the demise of white guilt.

That is why we characterized Gingrich's standing ovation as the 21st century's second most compelling dramatization of racial progress. Here again is what Gingrich said to provoke the applause: "I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their Creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job."

If a politician had said those words in 1964 (minus the swipe at "liberals," which wouldn't have made sense back then), his statement would have constituted a rejection of white supremacy. Today it is a rejection of white guilt. The words are as true today as they would have been then.

Some of those who stood and cheered last week surely had ancestors who believed in white supremacy and would have bristled (or worse) at the suggestion that "every American of every background" is equal. By enthusiastically applauding instead, they gave the lie to the liberal left's genetic fallacy.

Ombudsman to Journalists: Do Your Job Patrick Pexton, the Washington Post's ombudsman, gets lots of angry letters from conservatives complaining that the paper is too liberal and was insufficiently aggressive in reporting on Barack Obama's background during his 2008 campaign. Pexton admits the complainers have a point:

Deborah Howell, Post ombudsman from 2005 through 2008, said at the end of her tenure that "some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt [at The Post] are valid."

I won't quibble with her conclusion. I think she was right. I read all of The Post's lengthier, meatier stories on Obama published from October 2006 through Election Day 2008. That was about 120 stories, and tens of thousands of words, including David Maraniss's 10,000-word profile about Obama's Hawaii years, which I liked.

I think there was way too little coverage of his record in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate, for example, with one or two notably good exceptions. But there were hard-hitting stories too, even a very tough one on Michelle Obama's job at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

And that's what The Post needs to do in covering his reelection campaign this year: be hard-hitting on his record and provide fresh insight and plenty of context to put the past three rough years into perspective.

The headline: "Scrutinize President Obama's Record." We don't quibble with Pexton's conclusion either, but what kind of newspaper needs an ombudsman to tell it to report on the record of an incumbent president seeking re-election?

The New Yorker's Editor Must Be Quite a Tyrant "[President Obama] also could be ruthless toward members of his party in Congress. When he was informed in a memo that Representative Jim Oberstar, a Minnesota Democrat, wanted to write a highway bill that included a hundred and fifteen billion dollars more in spending than Obama had proposed, and which would be funded by a gas-tax increase, Obama wrote 'No,' and underlined it."--Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, Jan. 30 issue

Reports of His Death Have Been Slightly Exaggerated "UPDATE, 10:34 AM, JANUARY 22: Paterno died Sunday, the AP reports. Earlier: . . . A spokesperson for the Paterno family has denied a report by CBS that former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has died. CBS previously reported that the 85-year-old college-football legend had succumbed in his battle with lung cancer."--Puffington Host, Jan. 21

"According to one of his ex-wives, Newt Gingrich advocated open marriage as an alternative to monogamy or illicit sex. Of course, this was after he had strayed. Still, if her account is true, was he onto something? If more people considered such openness an option, would marriage become a stronger institution--less susceptible to cheating and divorce, and more attractive than unmarried cohabitation?"--New York Times website, Jan. 20

Leavers of Power "Newt Gingrich's Three Marriages Mean He Might Make a Strong President--Really," according to the headline on a FoxNews.com essay by Keith Ablow, "a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team." We can't tell if that "Really" is sarcastic or really real, but in either case it's the funniest piece we've read about Gingrich since Andy Ferguson's survey of the former speaker's literary output.

Ablow writes that because Gingrich persuaded three different women "to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we'll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we'll want to let him go after one." He notes that in dumping his first two wives, Gingrich "delivered to them incredibly painful truths," and observes: "I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies."

Oddly, he leaves out the strongest argument. The Los Angles Times reports that his tax records show that "Gingrich . . . reported making $19,800 in alimony payments in 2010." This is a man with two ex-wives and a net worth at least in the high seven figures. If he's as careful with our money as he is with his own, he'll go down as the most fiscally responsible president in history.